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“By heavens! She was strangled the moment the deed was done.”

He felt her neck.

“Strangled with the hands without leaving any special trace, neither the mark of the nails nor the imprint of the fingers. Quite right. It is little Louise Roque, sure enough!”

He carefully replaced the handkerchief.

“There’s nothing for me to do. She’s been dead for the last hour at least. We must give notice of the matter to the authorities.”

Renardet, standing up, with his hands behind his back, kept staring with a stony look at the little body exposed to view on the grass. He murmured:

“What a wretch! We must find the clothes.”

The doctor felt the hands, the arms, the legs. He said:

“She had been bathing no doubt. They ought to be at the water’s edge.”

The mayor thereupon gave directions:

“Do you, Principe” (this was his secretary), “go and find those clothes for me along the stream. You, Maxime” (this was the watchman), “hurry on toward Rouy-le-Tors and bring with you the magistrate with the gendarmes. They must be here within an hour. You understand?”

The two men started at once, and Renardet said to the doctor:

“What miscreant could have done such a deed in this part of the country?”

The doctor murmured:

“Who knows? Any one is capable of that. Every one in particular and nobody in general. No matter, it must be some prowler, some workman out of employment. Since we have become a Republic we meet only this kind of person along the roads.”

Both of them were Bonapartists.

The mayor went on:

“Yes, it can only be a stranger, a passer-by, a vagabond without hearth or home.”

The doctor added, with the shadow of a smile on his face:

“And without a wife. Having neither a good supper nor a good bed, he became reckless. You can’t tell how many men there may be in the world capable of a crime at a given moment. Did you know that this little girl had disappeared?”

And with the end of his stick he touched one after the other the stiffened fingers of the corpse, resting on them as on the keys of a piano.

“Yes, the mother came last night to look for me about nine o’clock, the child not having come home at seven to supper. We looked for her along the roads up to midnight, but we did not think of the wood. However, we needed daylight to carry out a thorough search.”

“Will you have a cigar?” said the doctor.

“Thanks, I don’t care to smoke. This thing affects me so.”

They remained standing beside the corpse of the young girl, so pale on the dark moss. A big blue fly was walking over the body with his lively, jerky movements. The two men kept watching this wandering speck.

The doctor said:

“How pretty it is, a fly on the skin! The ladies of the last century had good reason to paste them on their faces. Why has this fashion gone out?”

The mayor seemed not to hear, plunged as he was in deep thought.

But, all of a sudden, he turned round, surprised by a shrill noise. A woman in a cap and blue apron was running toward them under the trees. It was the mother, La Roque. As soon as she saw Renardet she began to shriek:

“My little girl! Where’s my little girl?” so distractedly that she did not glance down at the ground. Suddenly she saw the corpse, stopped short, clasped her hands and raised both her arms while she uttered a sharp, heartrending cry–the cry of a wounded animal. Then she rushed toward the body, fell on her knees and snatched away the handkerchief that covered the face. When she saw that frightful countenance, black and distorted, she rose to her feet with a shudder, then sinking to the ground, face downward, she pressed her face against the ground and uttered frightful, continuous screams on the thick moss.